New Complementary & Alternative Medicine Course for 2019

The course will examine issues related to research in Complementary and Alternative/Integrative Medicine, including specific issues in CAM/IM research, as well as research design, data collection and data analysis, ethical issues and dissemination of results. Participants will receive individual mentoring for a research proposal of their choice.

This is a rare opportunity to learn from such an experienced CAM practitioner. Professor Coulter has more than 40 years of experience conducting both qualitative and quantitative research on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) and Integrative Medicine (IM) and has published over 150 articles and books. His recent NIH grants include an Evidenced-Based Practices program in CAM; evaluation of hospital-based integrative medicine; and the context effects on the health encounter. He also holds grants from the US Department of Defence to conduct comparative effectiveness trials of chiropractic in military facilities; and an evaluation of the creation, implementation, and evaluation of health policies in Health Affairs.

Course Description:

The amount of data from research that is available for the public and health professionals on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) compared to biomedicine is extremely modest. This has numerous causes including the amount of funding available for such research, the number of researchers who work in this field and the difficulties of researching CAM. Those who do work in CAM are not frequently trained in research and those trained in research are not frequently knowledgeable about CAM. This course is intended to provide an introduction to those who want to advance the research agenda in CAM. It will provide an introduction to the challenges of researching in this field, the methods that are available to overcome many of those challenges. The objective of the course is to provide an understanding of CAM, knowledge of the research methods best suited to proving data on CAM and to instil an interest in researching CAM.

Structure:

HLTH442 will be taught as three blocks of two days each and students need to attend these sessions:

21-22 February (9am-5pm)

21-22 March (9am-5pm), and

18-19 April (9am-5pm).

HLTH442 can be credited towards a Postgraduate Certificate in Health Sciences (0.5 EFTS), the Postgraduate Diploma in Health Sciences (1 EFTS), the Master of Health Sciences Professional Practice, a taught masters (1.5 EFTS) or the Master of Health Sciences, a research-focused masters (2.0 EFTS).